and these is simply glamorous ( by the "metro" way of speaking not vista lol) Browsing deviantART

hope these will worke wiht Start8

Ok windows 7 is history now.But still that compresion for wallpapers...

Thanks. I'm working on a better version now.

Great ones on deviantART, thanks for the links!

That compression for wallpapers is still a mystery now that I found out I'm affected as well.
I use many gradient / blur wallpapers and I had to check by using img0.jpg (win7 again) thanks to Paulo for hammering on the issue.
If something comes up regarding the matter I'll definitely let you know.

Yep the one that I have doesn't have any animation because the 3 are identical. I just uploaded the one that came with the program for me...

Wow Hopachi that new start button is awesome. I'm using it now. Thanks heaps!

Originally Posted by Hopachi

That compression for wallpapers is still a mystery now that I found out I'm affected as well.
I use many gradient / blur wallpapers and I had to check by using img0.jpg (win7 again) thanks to Paulo for hammering on the issue.
If something comes up regarding the matter I'll definitely let you know.

Why not just convert all your wallpapers to PNG like I did? I don't get any noticeable quality loss with my wallpapers anymore...they seem to be the same quality as they were in Windows 7 now.

I've been reading around and it seems as though Microsoft has increased the compression of the cached image or transcoded wallpaper in windows 8 compared to previous versions of windows. It's not a bug...

It would be really cool if somebody could come up with a way of bypassing the compression. The only way I know of is to replace the cached image in this folder with your original wallpaper file:
C:\Users\Paul\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\CachedFiles

If you do this, windows uses the original file for the wallpaper rather than compressing it to a JPEG (or another JPEG if your file was originally a JPEG). Problem is that I got my wallpapers on rotation (or slideshow) so I'm not bothered to always replace this file

Yep the one that I have doesn't have any animation because the 3 are identical. I just uploaded the one that came with the program for me...

Wow Hopachi that new start button is awesome. I'm using it now. Thanks heaps!

Originally Posted by Hopachi

That compression for wallpapers is still a mystery now that I found out I'm affected as well.
I use many gradient / blur wallpapers and I had to check by using img0.jpg (win7 again) thanks to Paulo for hammering on the issue.
If something comes up regarding the matter I'll definitely let you know.

Why not just convert all your wallpapers to PNG like I did? I don't get any noticeable quality loss with my wallpapers anymore...they seem to be the same quality as they were in Windows 7 now.

I've been reading around and it seems as though Microsoft has increased the compression of the cached image or transcoded wallpaper in windows 8 compared to previous versions of windows. It's not a bug...

It would be really cool if somebody could come up with a way of bypassing the compression. The only way I know of is to replace the cached image in this folder with your original wallpaper file:
C:\Users\Paul\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\CachedFiles

If you do this, windows uses the original file for the wallpaper rather than compressing it to a JPEG (or another JPEG if your file was originally a JPEG). Problem is that I got my wallpapers on rotation (or slideshow) so I'm not bothered to always replace this file

Thanks.

Good info about the transcoded wallpapers. It' s true: I've tested it with that img0.jpg and from about 600kb sze it transcodes to 70kb (also in cache folder) no wonder the bad look, it's resized in low quality you see clearly.

BUT why so small? Maybe it has something to do with the claim that win8 uses reduced power consumption, better battery life for notebooks, something in power mamangement: like the option for disabling wallpaper slideshow when on batery or power saving mode... who knows. Be aware that these changes affect desktop pc's as well.

PNG is my favorite image format used in all work I do.

Why I don't use it for wallpapers applied to desktop?
It doesn't transcode correctly: way back in XP I always got bad colors in PNG but in Win7/8 it looks good.
But you'll see what's the catch.

Test:
The 600kb img0.jpg became a 2000kb (2mb) of img0.png, I apply it as desktop background and it looks good!If you look in ..AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\CachedFiles then you'll see a *.jpg file exceeding 1mb (good quality) but that is in fact still a png. It is renamed to jpg but that's not correct (call it: file cannibalism).

If you use many wallpapers in slideshows then you'll use a lot of space and if the transcoding doesn't work optimal you can get jittery transitions on older machines, but even if my pc is newer it's still something I'm not gonna apply: it was designed for JPG that I'm 100% sure.
So the transcoding doesn't work as it should for PNG and you get the full HD wallpapers. Use that it you like. It's the user's choice. But it's the only fix for now so I have to thank you for this.

If we know what settings were changed after Win7 (in registry) regarding this issue we would be able to change the settings back in Win8.

To me, on my small screen this is not annoying and I use mostly simple wallpapers where you do't see much difference.

It would be really cool if somebody could come up with a way of bypassing the compression. The only way I know of is to replace the cached image in this folder with your original wallpaper file:
C:\Users\Paul\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\CachedFiles

If you do this, windows uses the original file for the wallpaper rather than compressing it to a JPEG (or another JPEG if your file was originally a JPEG). Problem is that I got my wallpapers on rotation (or slideshow) so I'm not bothered to always replace this file

It would be really cool if somebody could come up with a way of bypassing the compression. The only way I know of is to replace the cached image in this folder with your original wallpaper file:
C:\Users\Paul\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\CachedFiles

If you do this, windows uses the original file for the wallpaper rather than compressing it to a JPEG (or another JPEG if your file was originally a JPEG). Problem is that I got my wallpapers on rotation (or slideshow) so I'm not bothered to always replace this file

hmmm...you cannot replace it will automatically make a new jpg copy

Not working. It will transcode a new one over it (right click refresh to see change).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------I've seen Win7 also: the transcoded wallpaper has original size/res + JPG extension.

In Win8: the transcoded wallpaper has reduced size/res + NO extension.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So the way the wallpapers are applied changed a bit between the two OSes.
This has probably something to do with the new auto-colorisation of the window border.My theory is that auto-colorisation needs to calculate the medium color and does this on the transcoded version because is faster to calculate (lower resolution). But even if you use constant color, the same transcoding happens (it's general).

This is all I can think of.
I don't have another idea about higher quality except you use PNG: but remember what I said about that earlier.

As I said, small screen here and don't really see big differences in the reduced size wallpapers (depends on the complexity - hard edges - many colors - combinations).

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